Opera gaining traction

This week, 250 non-professional artists are performing with the professional singers and musicians of the Liceu Opera House in Barcelona, in the première of La Gata Perduda (The Lost Cat). It’s the culmination of a four-year co-creation process that has seen this bastion of Catalan culture working for the first time with its own neighbours, the people of Raval – a most densely populated, diverse and dynamic a square kilometre as any you might find in Europe. 

Whatever happens on stage – and I expect it to be glorious – neither opera house nor neighbourhood will be the same. 

I didn’t expect to be working on opera in the autumn of my days. When I started in community arts, opera was the very symbol of what we opposed – a privileged centre of cultural authority that seemed untroubled by its exclusivity. 

I’d grown up a bit in the subsequent decades but when I was invited to join Traction, a project funded by the EU Horizon research programme, I was still doubtful about how far opera could really open itself to communities, or their rapidly changing culture. 

Staging the social divisions they set out to overcome

What I knew about community opera suggested that the form’s technical demands made it almost impossible to escape a logic in which non-professionals sing chorally behind professional artists in the leading roles, in effect staging precisely the social divisions that they set out to overcome.

Traction has not entirely solved that problem, but it has produced three wildly different operas that show solutions exist – and that the results can be artistically exciting and socially transformational at the same time. 

The project is quite complicated, bringing together opera producers, research institutes and universities in five countries. But in simple terms, it rests on two axes: technological innovation and co-creation. The first has involved finding ways of using new digital tools to facilitate the second. 

Traction puts technology in the service of creation and storytelling, as has always been the case in opera. The tools have been essential to the three operas, but my field is co-creation and that’s what I want to highlight here.

The term ‘artist’ is not a judgement of quality

We describe it as the creation of art by professional and non-professional artists. Everyone on stage, or in the workshop, is an artist just as everyone in the London marathon is a runner: the term is not a judgement of quality. 

But there is a meaningful difference between people who have a professional training and practice and those who do not. The first are not ‘better’ than the second – on the contrary, they may be blinkered by their training and the fresh perspective of a non-professional artist can open new possibilities. 

What matters is the interaction between them, and how it empowers everyone to create work together that they could not have created alone. There is an intention to work in a spirit of mutual respect, with all those involved having an equal voice in shaping what happens. 

The reality is far more complex, but that is the vision, and it was followed in each of the Traction operas. 

The Lost Cat

La Gata Perduda at the Liceu is the most ambitious, bringing a new opera to the main stage of a 2,300-seat theatre. It involves 495 local people directly and 72 community organisations. 

Written by Arnaud Tordera and Victoria Szpunberg, it is based on meetings with people in Raval and tells a story of resistance to exploitative urban development. 

It is political (in the broad sense of the word) in content, form and purpose, and is a first stage of a commitment by the Liceu to transform its relationship with society in Barcelona and Catalonia. 

La Gata Perduda rehearsals, Liceu, Barcelona. Photo Irene Calvis

Time. As We Are

The Portuguese opera, O Tempo. (Somos Nós) – Time. As We Are is also work for change, in the lives of the people involved and the role of the arts in the rehabilitation of offenders. Led by a remarkable music school, SAMP, it was co-created with inmates of a youth prison in Leiria, with some of their relatives and the staff of the prison. 

It used the myth of Ulysses and Penelope to make the separation so fundamental in prison life a moving and personal experience that everyone could identify with. It was performed in June 2022, twice in the prison, and twice at a concert hall in Lisbon, with performers in two locations connected by live video. Music work continues at the prison, with funding secured for the next three years. 

Out of the Ordinary

The third Traction opera, by Irish National Opera, is wholly dependent on technology. Out of the Ordinary / As An nGnách is a bilingual Virtual Reality (VR) opera, co-created by Finola Merivale (music), Jody O’Neil (words) and Jo Mangan (direction) with about a hundred people from different parts of Ireland. 

It was presented at the Dublin Fringe Festival in September to audiences who wore VR headsets to experience a myth about ecological disaster, with two alternative endings determined by each viewer’s responses during the 20-minute performance. It’s opera, Jim, but not as we know it.

Traction will wind up at the end of this year, and we are writing up the research and building a new website that will share our experience as fully as possible, with tools and resources for anyone who wants to follow this path. 

We haven’t found all the answers, and some of those we have found are imperfect, but we hope that the three operas show that co-creation can offer valuable new processes, forms and narratives, and, more importantly, that they can find new connections between opera and our changing societies.  
François Matarasso is a freelance community artist, writer and researcher.

 www.arestlessart.com | www.traction-project.eu 
 @arestlessart